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Interstellar review: an awe-inspiring mess

If you loved Christopher Nolan's other films, go and see Interstellar without reading this review.

Otherwise, it contains as few spoilers as possible...

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Christopher Nolan is a filmmaker obsessed with the human mind: whether its capacity to dream (Inception), to fail (Memento) or to be tricked (The Prestige). His subject in Interstellar -- his most ambitious film to date ­-- is the mind's capacity for imagination: to think beyond the physical world, whether our literal world of planet Earth or the very limits of quantum physics. Interstellar is a film that simultaneously venerates science, yet asks you to suspend your disbelief. The result is a film of dazzling, galactic ambition, that is ultimately undone by earthbound problems.

The plot, at least at first, is simple: at some point in the near future (exact details about timings or events are cleverly withheld) Earth is undergoing an environmental crisis, with rolling droughts and vast, apocalyptic dust storms. Humanity has long given up on exploring the universe; instead, all resources are being ploughed into farming fields of failing crops.

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One such farmer is Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), a former Nasa pilot and engineer, who is now left salvaging surveillance drones to power the combine harvesters that help feed his family. Despite his attempts at giving his kids a rigorous scientific upbringing, Cooper's daughter Murphy (Mackenzie Foy) believes in the supernatural: specifically a ghost that appears to be trying to communicate from the beyond. Neat and immersive, the first act serves to set up both the emotional core of the film and its second two hours: Cooper is eventually drafted in to pilot a secret, final Nasa mission to explore possible new home worlds for the human race via a mysterious wormhole that has conveniently cropped up near Saturn.

The less said about what happens next, the better.

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Nolan's vision of space travel is both familiar (the film borrows heavily from 2001: A Space Odyssey) and impressively original -- particularly the crew's monolithic robot companions TARS and CASE, who provide much of the film's best dialogue. The visuals of wormholes and black holes are terrifyingly believable (Nolan consulted the world's leading expert on wormholes, CALtech physicist Kip Thorne) and the vistas of alien worlds bleak and unforgiving. However, without Nolan's longtime collaborator, cinematographer Wally Pfister, the director's typical spectacular set pieces are largely absent -- the viewer is left longing for a flipping corridor or a dangling plane fuselage.

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Her cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema instead relies on the interplay between sparse, epic expanses and the tight confines of the crew's spacecraft.

The cast is also excellent: particularly McConaughey, who continues his recent form with a warm believability and emotional heft that the film desperately needs. Other Nolan favourites, including Michael Caine and Anne Hathaway, are excellent but regrettably underused -- for a film about the fate of humanity, there's very little on show. Besides, the script -- heavy on exposition and painstaking explanations of the science -- has little room for human relationships outside the Cooper family dynamic, which holds the film together. There's no time: it's too busy hurtling between worlds and grand twists, plummeting into the film's third act as if spinning into a black hole. Yet for all its endeavour, the script -- written by Nolan and his brother and longtime collaborator Jonathan Nolan -- is clunky and disjointed.

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The dialogue spills into the cringe-inducing at times: in the screening WIRED attended, certain lines were so awkward that they elicited audible laughs from the audience.

And then there's Interstellar's third act, at which point the film falls apart. It's ending is designed to be divisive, and will no doubt spark countless hours of debate, just as

Inception's did. Many will be (and judging by early reactions, already are) dazzled by it. Others will loathe it.

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Needless to say, after spending two hours setting rigorous rules and delivering patient scientific explanations, all logic goes out the window, and Nolan asks the audience to make enormous leaps to fill in gaping narrative holes.

But this is Nolan's talent as a filmmaker: he works with the power of suggestion, and leaves spaces for the audiences to fill with their imagination. Like his characters in The Prestige, he is a magician; a master in the art of misdirection; a purveyor of impressive -- if occasionally cheap -- tricks. The rules are only there so that you are wowed when they are broken. It's a real shame, because there is some dazzling originality and vision here; for all its real failings,

Interstellar is not far off being a masterpiece. Instead, in shooting for the Moon, it finds its place amongst the stars.